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Yūsuke has never really felt fear like a normal person, has never had the same relationship with it that everyone else has always said she’s supposed to have.
Other kids had been afraid of the dark, of ghosts and spiders and the empty spaces inside closets and under beds.
But even at a young age, Yūsuke had known better. Had known there were far worse things in the world than dead things and bugs. Had known that sometimes dark closets and the underneath of beds could keep someone safe from those other, much worse things.
Things with big hands and loud voices that didn’t bother to hide who and what they really were once the apartment door was shut, and didn’t hesitate to use force to get their point across.
Which is probably why when faced with some new threat, when confronted with something strange and unsettling, or with something that can only be described as not right, instead of being afraid, Yūsuke tends to get angry.
Which, to be completely fair, angry also tends to be her general state of being at any given moment anyway.
Because, for as far back as Yūsuke can remember, rage has always been her go-to emotion.
Her default, factory setting.
Most days, she’s pretty sure she was born pissed off, fresh out of the box and absolutely filled up to the brim with rage.
Even her very first memory is rageful, red-tinted around the edges and sharp enough to cut.
Because if she closes her eyes and tries really hard, Yūsuke can remember being three years old.
Can remember screaming and crying for her old man to stop.
If she focuses, if she pushes everything else away and turns her attention down and in, Yūsuke can remember the faded feeling of beating her small fists against his back, his shoulders, his legs. Can remember screaming and swinging at any part of him she could reach to try and get him off her Mama, to get him to stop hitting her, to stop hurting her, to go away and leave them both alone forever.
It had never worked.
No matter how hard she’d swung or how loud she had screamed, there had always been a next time.
Had always been more apologies that never mattered or lasted, and always, always, ended in more bruises for Atsuko.
But Yūsuke will always remember how hard she’d tried.
And how every time she failed, the anger she’d feel afterward would burrow deeper and deeper into her chest.
It had stacked, year after year, growing on and over itself, the rage, the helplessness that even then Yūsuke had been determined not to admit to feeling but had been unable to bury completely.
Anger at her old man’s heavy hands and cigarette stink.
Anger at the aunties who whispered behind their hands and pulled the other kids away from Yūsuke whenever Atsuko wandered through the neighborhood with yet another black eye or split lip. The same ones who always sneered at Atsuko just because she’d been so young when she’d had Yūsuke. The ones who were always all too happy to judge and condemn, but never offered any actual help.
Anger at her own weakness, her own inability to make it stop or to convince Atsuko to leave.
Anger at Atsuko for staying despite the blood and the bruises, despite the way Yūsuke begged and pleaded. For not thinking that Yūsuke herself was reason enough to leave.
Looking back, older and harder and with a handful of years between then and now, Yūsuke isn’t actually surprised about that fact. Because when things were laid out, Atsuko had never been much of a mom to Yūsuke. Not even back then in the years when Yūsuke had actually needed her.
Maybe especially then.
Sure, they'd always had a place to live, but Yūsuke remembers being small and trapped in a house where the kitchen was always filled with more beer bottles instead of actual food.
Remembers nights when Yūsuke had slept in her closet to escape the noises from whatever screaming match or party, or occasionally both, was happening just past her bedroom door.
Remembers days and weeks of being hungry and dirty and angry and unable to stop being any of the three in ways that really made a difference because she didn’t know how.
The old man had flitted in and out of their lives like a heavy-handed breeze, but for all that Atsuko had stayed, she had never seemed to have much of anything that actually mattered to spare for Yūsuke.
At least that’s what it had always felt like.
Until the moment that it finally didn’t.
Because the first time her bastard father had raised a hand to her when she was eight?
The very first time he'd finally tired of beating on Atsuko and had found Yusuke's attempts to stop him to be annoying instead of funny?
The first time he’d drawn that big hand back and cracked it across Yūsuke’s face hard enough to send her sprawling across the cheap, cracked linoleum?
Atsuko had clawed her way up off the kitchen floor, her face bloody and right eye already swelling shut, and she had reached for the kitchen knife lying abandoned on the countertop.
For the first time in Yūsuke's memory, Atsuko had fought back.
Her old man had left that night, a long cut down one forearm and broken glass dusting his silk shirt, and he’d never come back.
Atsuko, chest heaving, had stared at the empty doorway for the longest time.
Then she’d sighed, finally dropped the knife she’d been clutching, and staggered across the apartment to lock the door.
Yūsuke had slept in Atsuko’s bed that night for the first time in years.
“Anyone ever hits you,” Atsuko had told her later when they’d been curled around each other in the dark, “you hit ‘em back twice as hard, you hear me? Someone even thinks about trying to hurt you, and I want you to hurt them first. You hurt them so bad that they’re too fucking scared of you to ever think about it again. Don’t be stupid like me.”
For a few months after that, things had been calmer.
Yūsuke had felt like she was able to breathe for the first time in her entire life.
Atsuko had been bruise-free and present.
There had been good days where Atsuko had finally done mom things with Yūsuke. Had tutted over the short hair Yūsuke had started hacking off two years ago like she was seeing it for the first time. She’d bought Yūsuke school supplies and deep cleaned the apartment. Had even taken the time to teach Yūsuke how to do a little more in the kitchen beyond half burning rice.
But it hadn’t lasted.
Of course it hadn’t.
The old man might have stayed gone, but the parties, the strangers in the apartment, the drinking, and all of the rest had all slowly come back.
Had crept back in around the corners of their life until eventually it was just like it had been before, just with fewer bruises on Atsuko’s part.
And in the end, just like before, all Yūsuke had been left with was her anger.
Well, her anger and Keiko of course.
Because, beneath all the shit that her life has piled on top of her, Keiko has always been the brightest, best thing in Yūsuke’s entire world.
Keiko, who had looked at Yūsuke with her messy hair, worn clothes, and boy’s name, and had smiled instead of turning away like all the other kids.
Keiko who had stayed through every fight, every detention, every sneer by every sensei or auntie on the street. Who defended Yūsuke against the other kids and never let what anyone said about Yūsuke turn her away.
Keiko who had just sighed when Yūsuke had hacked her hair off up to her ears when they were seven, and then took Yūsuke home with her so that her own mom could even it out into a cute pixie cut instead of the chunky, shoulder-length mess it had been.
Keiko who scolded Yūsuke for her cursing and nagged her about doing her homework or not beating up the neighborhood boys or eating the bento that Keiko always packed for her.
Keiko who always, always stayed, no matter how angry Yūsuke got.
Which is why Yūsuke has done her level best to make it clear to every punk, delinquent, and gangbanger in the city that Keiko is untouchable.
Because Yūsuke might not have much else, might not be worth much else, but she can be and do this.
Can keep the one good thing in her life safe and clean, no matter what or who she has to beat down to do it.
Besides, if she’s being honest with herself, Yūsuke is pretty sure that if it wasn’t for Keiko, all that would be left inside of her would be all that anger.
Because at the end of the day, anger is familiar.
Anger is … safe.
It’s hard to feel frightened or hurt by anything or anyone when you’re already filled up to the brim with rage.
Which, again, is probably why when the short guy with the weird, spiky hair sprouts a third fucking eye, Yūsuke’s first reaction isn’t to freak out and run away screaming.
Instead, Yūsuke’s body moves automatically. She rears back and slams the steel pipe she’d been poking his previously limp body with right across his face with all of her not-inconsiderable strength.
The eye blinks up at her, flaring with an eerie lavender-tinted light.
Yūsuke rears back and hits him again.
And then when that doesn’t change anything, she hits him a third time.
Finally the eye dims back down and blinks closed.
“What the absolute fuck?” Yūsuke hisses as she stares down at him, hand still clenched around the now dented pipe.
For a long moment she just stands there, mind clicking over what’s just happened and what she should do now that it’s done.
Finding some random guy bleeding out in the park wasn’t what she’d been banking on when she’d strolled out of the apartment earlier, unable to sleep and intent on wandering the streets for a few hours or hitting up the all-night arcade instead.
Having that same guy sprout a third fucking eye hadn’t been anywhere on her shitty day bingo card either.
So, really, the fact that she may or may not have then beaten him the rest of the way to death with a pipe shouldn’t be counted against her.
A justifiable homicide if Yūsuke has ever seen one.
Plus, if she hauls ass back home now no one will ever know she was here.
And any of the shitheads and judgmental sneering aunties in the area who might blame her anyway, because they tend to blame Yūsuke for anything from bad weather to the tax rate so murder wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, won’t actually be able to prove it.
Yūsuke backs up a step and then another, some part of her unwilling to turn her back completely on that too still body.
But before she can take a third step back something stops her.
Some small, all too familiar voice in the back of her head that sounds annoyingly Keiko-like, refuses to let her keep going.
Refuses to let her just leave the guy lying there, possibly dead or possibly just forcefully unconscious and still bleeding.
Because Keiko, for all that she has a mean ass swing whenever Yūsuke really pisses her off, would absolutely try to help this guy. Freaky ass third eye or not.
“Fuck this and fuck you, brain-Keiko,” Yūsuke mutters, hand tightening around the pipe.
Yūsuke shuffles forward, takes a second to not-so-gently nudge the guy with the end of the pipe again, and then crouches down beside him when he doesn’t so much as twitch.
Eyes narrowed, Yūsuke tries to tell if he’s breathing, if his chest is moving at all, but between the shadows covering this area of the park and the dark coat/cloak thing he’s wearing, it’s hard to tell.
When she reaches out her free hand to press it against his chest, she feels nothing, no rise and fall to prove he’s breathing, nothing.
Which is … not good overall.
“Ew, maybe-dead guy germs,” Yūsuke mutters to herself as she scuttles, crab-like, a few inches closer so that she’s hovering over him.
With one hand pressed to the gravel on one side of him and the other using the pipe to balance, Yūsuke leans down enough to press her ear against his chest.
Nothing.
No breathing.
No heartbeat.
Nothing.
“Okay,” Yūsuke can’t help but comment when she pulls back, “actually a dead guy then.”
Except.
When Yūsuke sits back on her heels and glances up …
That third eye is staring at her again.
The pipe swings out almost before Yūsuke realizes she’s moving, cracking mercilessly across the guy’s face.
The eye closes again.
“Stay closed this time,” Yūsuke orders, pointing the pipe at the thing.
For a long moment Yūsuke just stands there, back where she’d been a few minutes ago, a sort of dead guy with a freaky third eye at her feet and no idea what she should do about that.
Almost against her will, her eyes track to the thick stretch of bushes that line the back side of the park. She could just drag him there and wash her hands of the entire thing.
But …
Ugh.
Kids do like this park, and if she leaves his body there then some little rugrat will totally be the one to find him. Then there’ll be screaming and someone will absolutely notice that third eye and then the government is gonna get called and if, no when, Keiko somehow finds out that Yūsuke was involved in all of this, because she always finds out somehow, she’s going to do that thing where she’s less mad than she is disappointed in Yūsuke’s everything and Yūsuke just can’t deal with that again this calendar year …
So …
Yūsuke is going to have to do something about this.
The only issue is she has no fucking idea what that something is.
“Uh, Urameshi?” A familiar, stupid voice breaks into Yūsuke’s thought spiral like the sun rising over the horizon of her bad choices.
Yūsuke spins around, pipe still in hand and something like hope blossoming in her heart.
“Kuwabara, you big oaf,” Yūsuke practically beams, ignoring the way Kuwabara’s still bruised face twists in a mix of confusion and fear. “For once I’m actually happy to see you.”
And she’s not even lying, which is the strangest and funniest part of it all.
Her and Kuwabara’s relationship is … complicated on a good day. Mostly because it had taken her a while to beat him and his ‘I don’t hit girls’ honor code bullshit into something at least semi-tolerable. Eventually though, he’d learned to see her as Yūsuke-the-fighter first and then as Yūsuke-the-girl as a very very distant second.
So between that and the fact that he’d once jumped some dickhead upperclassman who’d flipped Keiko’s skirt before Yūsuke could get to him, Kuwabara isn’t completely intolerable.
Mostly.
In a certain light.
And from a certain distance.
They’re not friends or anything, no matter what Keiko likes to say or how often they end up at the same place doing the same things or kicking the same asses together, but at least this way Yūsuke is no longer swimming in this mess alone.
“Stop smiling and don’t say things like that,” Kuwabara huffs back, one hand clutching a plastic bag that looks to be full of snacks and magazines. “It’s freaky.”
“Oh buddy,” Yūsuke can’t help but say cheerfully, “you have no idea.”
Yūsuke has realized in the past half hour or so that there’s an entirely new metric for freak-shit that she’d previously been unaware of.
There’s a moment's pause.
“Uh, did you beat someone else up?” Kuwabara asks, head tilted to the side as he stares just past her.
“Why?” Yūsuke cuts back, idly flipping the pipe in her hand. “Are your bruises gettin’ jealous? Don’t worry, I’ll give you some fresh ones later.”
“Not if I give you bruises first, Urameshi!” Kuwabara can’t help but bluster. “I’m getting stronger every day! You’re not gonna win next time.”
“Please,” Yūsuke huffs at him. “You couldn’t kick my ass if I stood still and let you.”
Kuwabara puffs up like he always does, obviously gearing up for another round of trash talking that’s more than likely gonna end with Yūsuke having to deal with two possibly dead bodies instead of one, before he abruptly freezes.
From the corner of her eye, Yūsuke catches the faintest hint of a familiar lavender glow.
“I said stay closed, damn it all,” Yūsuke seethes, whipping around to point the pipe at that fucking eye again.
For a moment, the eye just stares up at her, but when Yūsuke draws the pipe back again the eye slowly closes, an air of something almost sulking in the way it drifts shut.
“U-Urameshi,” Kuwabara practically whispers, “what the hell is that thing?”
“Fuck if I know,” Yūsuke admits.
“I knew I should have stayed home,” Kuwabara groans. “You always get me into trouble.”
“Hey!” Yūsuke protests. “That guy was all bloody when I got here, which isn’t really a big deal, but the freak-ass third eye took me by surprise too. Besides, it ain’t my fault you’re here past your big boy bedtime. Didn’t Shizuru threaten to run you up a flagpole the next time you broke curfew?”
Unspoken is the fact that the only girl who might scare Kuwabara more than Yūsuke is his older sister. But given the fact that Yūsuke once saw Shizuru curb-stomp a yakuza without dropping the ash from her cigarette, she doesn’t really blame him. Shizuru is impressive.
Plus, she cuts Yūsuke’s hair for free these days so it’s a win-win in her opinion.
“Yeah,” Kuwabara admits easily enough, shoulders hunching just a bit. “But I couldn’t sleep. The tickle feeling has been going crazy all night…”
“Stop right there,” Yūsuke holds up her free hand, “I do not want to hear more about whatever puberty is doing to you. Bad enough I bleed for a week every month now, I don’t need to know about whatever it is you’ve got going on.”
“It’s a ghost thing, not a puberty thing!” Kuwabara sputters, voice cracking just a bit as he kicks gravel in Yūsuke’s direction.
“Sure sure,” Yūsuke waves him off. “You and your granny with a knife chasing you through your dreams shit. Just say you still believe in the boogey-man and get it over with.”
“Oh the weird dude has a third eye but ghosts can’t be real?” Kuwabara flaps his arm at her, the bag he’s still holding rustling.
Which …
Huh.
Kuwabara might actually have a point for once.
Miracles do happen.
Not that she plans to ever tell him that to his face.
“Whatever,” Yūsuke waves the thought off. “Just help me move this thing somewhere else.”
“What?!” Kuwabara squawks. “Hell no! I’m not touching that. What if it’s contagious!? I don’t want a third eye!”
“Oh, so you wanna just leave him here for the kiddos to find tomorrow?” Yūsuke taunts before pulling out her trump card. “Or what if some cute little stray cat comes and takes a nibble and ends up infected? Then it’ll be running around with a third eye, and it’ll end up in a shelter but no one will want to adopt it, so then someone will call the government and it’ll be put do-”
“I get it, I get it!!” Kuwabara folds just like Yūsuke had known he would, grumbling as he steps forward, shoving the snack bag into Yūsuke’s chest. “I hate you so much.”
“All in a day’s work,” Yūsuke quips back unbothered.
Besides, Yūsuke is pretty sure she could carry the guy herself even if he’s only a few inches shorter than her, but this means Kuwabara being freakishly tall for their age can come in handy yet again.
Plus this way she can carry her pipe and keep a watch over that eye.
“Ooph, he’s shrimpy, but he’s heavy,” Kuwabara complains as he pulls the weird guy up off the ground and over his shoulder like a bag of rice. “Like he’s made out of bricks or something.”
Yūsuke just grunts, tucking the pipe into her armpit as she rummages through the snack bag. A triumphant little noise escapes her when she spots a choco melonpan. She immediately steals it and wastes no time opening it with her teeth.
“So,” Kuwabara cuts in then, “now what?”
Yūsuke, melonpan already half eaten, pauses.
Thinks.
Realizes there was only ever going to be one real next step.
~~~
“Psst,” Yūsuke hisses, one hand curled around the drainage pipe as she knocks lightly on the window with the other, “psst, Keiko! Keiko, open up!”
The pale pink curtains are abruptly ripped open and there she is, Yūsuke’s actual best friend, glaring at her hard enough to set her on fire through the window’s glass.
Yūsuke grins, trying to channel the cuteness that supposedly still exists inside of her somewhere, deep deep down.
Probably too deep for her to actually reach if the way Keiko’s nostrils flare in rage are anything to go by.
“What,” Keiko hisses as she slams the window open, “are you doing up there, Yūsuke!? You could have knocked on the door like a normal person inste-”
“Hypothetically,” Yūsuke rushes out, “if you had to hide an alien’s body, where would you put it?”
A beat passes.
Keiko stares.
Yūsuke stares back.
Somewhere below, hidden in the shadows, Kuwabara shuffles his feet, a maybe-sort of dead, possibly/probably an alien guy on his shoulder whose third eye Yūsuke had only had to threaten twice more on the walk here.
“It’s a school night!” Keiko finally rages, the hellfire in her eyes something that Yūsuke is absolutely going to have to pay for later with something extreme like letting Keiko paint her nails or practice makeup on her again.
“Priorities, Keiko!” Yūsuke barks back.
“You can’t even spell priorities!” Keiko seethes, leaning forward out of the window to poke Yūsuke in the shoulder.
Which.
Fair.
“Well, excuse me for not being a nerd like you, little Miss Class President,” Yūsuke fires back, shifting her grip on the drainage pipe so she can get a little further into Keiko’s face.
Which is something Yūsuke might or might not have specifically shown up to class in order to vote for, but she’ll never admit it.
“Uh, Urameshi,” Kuwabara’s voice floats up from beneath them.
Keiko pauses, mouth hanging open as she blinks at Yūsuke, whatever new tirade she’d obviously been about to unleash dying.
“Kazuma?” Keiko leans a little further out the window. “Is that you?”
“Who the hell is Kazuma?” Yūsuke snarls, immediately bristling even if she’s not one hundred percent sure why.
“Yūsuke!” Keiko huffs.
“That’s my first name!” Kuwabara calls up at them. “You know that!”
“Bullshit,” Yūsuke cuts back. “You don’t have one of those.”
Yūsuke briefly considers kicking one of her shoes off and hoping her aim is good enough to hit him in the head with it from this angle before she dismisses the idea. She can always follow up on her earlier promise to give him more bruises later.
“Look, that’s Kuwabara, not Kazoo or whatever you called him,” Yūsuke glares at Keiko. “Got it? Ku-wa-bar-a. I’m Yūsuke, the idiot is Kuwabara, and I call you Keiko while he never speaks to you again.”
And Keiko …
Keiko just giggles, a cute blush rising on her cheeks as she stares at Yūsuke with an expression gone abruptly soft.
“Can we please get back to the dead guy thing?” Kuwabara finally calls up to them, voice entirely too loud for both the time and especially the situation. “I think he’s leaking all over my shoulder!”
“Oh yeah, just announce to the entire neighborhood that we’ve got a corpse with us, dumbass,” Yūsuke hisses back.
“W-Wha-” Keiko finally seems to realize something is actually up beyond Yūsuke being bored and interested in mischief.
“To be entirely fair to Kuwabara,” a soft, unfamiliar voice suddenly speaks up, “you are all rather loud.”
Yūsuke yelps, slides halfway down the drainpipe, only to register that the voice came from above her, and thus entirely too close to Keiko, and then abruptly powers her way back up the pipe.
“Who the fuck said that?” Yūsuke snarls as she lunges off the pipe and toward Keiko’s window, latching onto the frame and swinging herself around so that her feet are planted on the windowsill as she scans the area.
Keiko falls back with a yelp, but Yūsuke doesn’t focus on that, too intent on keeping herself between Keiko and whoever the fuck this is.
It only takes her a second to spot him.
Crouched just to the right and above them on the edge of Keiko’s actual roof and conveniently lit up by the street light is a guy.
A really really pretty guy, Yūsuke can’t help but notice with a blink.
With a slim, almost delicate build, short, startlingly red hair, and piercing green eyes, the guy looks maybe a year or two older than they are. But he also has the kind of sharp, attractive face that Yūsuke normally expects to see on an idol of some sort and not on some stranger roaming around on her best friend’s roof.
Which, after the night Yūsuke has already had, is extra suspicious.
“Who are you and why the hell are you here?” Yūsuke barks the questions out.
“You may call me Kurama,” Pretty Boy, Kurama, says. “Perhaps we could speak inside? All of us?”
“No way in hell you’re getting in this house,” Yūsuke immediately denies, ignoring the way that Keiko is tugging on the back of her shirt.
Instead of responding, there’s a blur of movement, Kuwabara yelps down below them, and then suddenly Yūsuke finds herself face-to-too-pretty-face with Kurama, the maybe alien-dead guy now slung over his shoulder.
“I’m afraid I must insist,” Kurama says, expression even and calm as he keeps those too-green eyes locked firmly on Yūsuke’s face.
Yūsuke is a lot of things, most of them not good, but she’s always been excellent at clocking a threat.
And Kurama?
He might be pretty, but Yūsuke is suddenly completely convinced that it’s the same way a poisonous plant or a venomous snake is pretty.
“Kuwabara,” Yūsuke calls. “Get your ass up here. Now.”
Yūsuke has never really needed backup before, has always been able to handle her battles on her own, but with Keiko in the line of fire of whatever this is or might become?
She’s not willing to take a chance.
Yūsuke ducks back into Keiko’s room without taking her eyes off of Kurama, herding Keiko behind her as she moves. She doesn’t stop until Keiko is settled just in front of her bedroom door, close enough to get it open and haul ass if necessary, with Yūsuke acting as a solid wall between her and the rest of the room.
Kurama steps gracefully in through Keiko’s window a few seconds later and even from here, Yūsuke can hear Kuwabara’s clumsy clattering as he scrambles up the drainage pipe.
Sure enough, after a few more tense seconds, during which Kurama sets his burden down on Keiko’s bedroom floor and props him against the wall just beside the window, Kuwabara comes tumbling in through the window, Yūsuke’s steel pipe in hand.
To his credit, Kuwabara wastes no time in sliding around Kurama and planting himself just beside and slightly behind Yūsuke, another line of defense for Keiko. He also passes the pipe back to Keiko in a move Yūsuke can’t help but agree with.
They’re both far more accustomed to using their fists and feet when it comes to an actual no-holds-barred dust-up.
“Start talking,” Yūsuke orders.
There’s a moment of tense silence as Kurama stares at them, eyes tracking over Yūsuke and Kuwabara both.
Yūsuke doesn’t miss the way his attention touches on Keiko either, or the slight quirk of amusement that touches his mouth at the way Yūsuke immediately shifts to obstruct his view again.
Pretty bastard.
“I can admit this was not exactly the situation I expected to find when I decided to investigate,” Kurama says. “I felt the Jagan pulse quite a few times in the past hour and thought it wiser to ascertain just what Hiei was doing in the area so soon after our last … encounter. I did not expect him to be hibernating or for my search to lead me here.”
Okay, Yūsuke drawls the word out in her mind, most of that sounded like gibberish.
But given the situation, well, Yūsuke is absolutely picking up some context clues.
And one very important detail that sticks out to her.
“Hate to break it to you, pretty boy, but that dude’s dead,” Yūsuke can’t help but point out. “No breathing, no heartbeat, plus all that bleeding he was doing earlier? That tends to equal deader than dead.”
“Do not worry yourself on that account,” Kurama waves a hand nonchalantly. “Hiei is very much alive. Heartbeats and detectable breathing are human tendencies that yōkai biology did not find necessary to develop.”
Yūsuke feels more than sees the way that Kuwabara stiffens beside her and Keiko’s free hand clenches tighter in the back of her shirt as the implications of everything Kurama has just said really hits them.
Or the way it turns Yūsuke’s entire worldview on its head.
Not that she has time for that particular thought spiral at the moment.
“Huh,” Yūsuke breaks the silence. “And here I am with all my money put down on alien instead of creature straight out of folklore.”
“Apologies for the disappointment,” Kurama offers, expression still as calm as before.
But, Yūsuke is startled to notice, there is suddenly a skirt-like yellow flower in Kurama’s hand.
Yūsuke has no idea where he had gotten it from; she hadn’t even seen him move.
“Why are you telling us this?” Keiko speaks up then, standing on her tiptoes to peek over Yūsuke’s shoulder.
Trust Keiko to cut through the bullshit in the room and ask the real question.
“There is no harm in it,” Kurama says. “The memory will not s-”
“Oi!” Yūsuke cuts through whatever he was about to say, one hand coming up to point threateningly at the biggest pain in her ass of the night. “Knock that shit off right now! How many times do I have to tell you to go back to sleep?”
Kurama stops.
Looks down.
Yūsuke can’t help the small spike of amusement that hits her at the way his eyes go wide as he realizes just what Yūsuke is talking to.
The third eye, still glowing faintly lavender, continues to stare at the room for a moment, and Yūsuke in particular, before slowly, again almost poutingly, slipping back closed.
There’s a pause.
“This has happened before?” Kurama asks.
“Bought half a dozen times,” Yūsuke admits. “I hit it with a pipe a few times, but after that it seemed to get the point. Now it just closes for a while if I tell it to stop.”
There’s another very obviously charged pause.
“Well now,” Kurama finally says with a slow blink of his own. “How … unexpected. Though I do suppose that does change things.”
The flower is abruptly no longer in his hand.
Instead Kurama moves to pull out Keiko’s desk chair and settles himself down on it without a by-your-leave.
“Please,” Kurama crosses his legs and settles his hands on the curve of his knee, “get comfortable. I’m afraid we will be here for some time to come.”
“Or,” Yūsuke cuts back, “here’s a radical idea: you can take your not-dead friend and his freaky eye and get the hell out of this house. We can all just agree to forget this ever happened, and we all go about our lives.”
“That was my original intention,” Kurama answers. “I had intended to take the memory of this night from all of you and move along. The three of you would have woken up with a mild headache and a bit of easily overlooked memory loss, none the wiser to the reality of the worlds and all the safer for it.”
Yūsuke feels the way Keiko’s breath catches even as her own fists clench harder.
The thought that Kurama is capable of doing something like that, that they could have been left unconscious and vulnerable like that …
Well.
Yūsuke hates it on a number of different levels, and she knows that Keiko does as well.
“And now?” Yūsuke bites the question out, leaning as always on that familiar pillar of anger.
“Unfortunately, I did not take all variables into account,” Kurama easily admits. “Mainly because I never considered this particular outcome to be possible.”
“Can you please just spit it out?” Yūsuke huffs.
“The Jagan Eye seems to like you,” Kurama replies, eyes locked with Yūsuke’s own. “It has repeatedly flared in your presence of its own accord but has made no move to actually attack. Which is … odd to say the least. Still, if it has some attachment to you, then it also means that any effort I might take to erase your presence from Hiei’s senses once he wakes will be for naught. The Jagan will simply lead him back to you. And Hiei has never been one for things such as mercy or forgiveness. When he finds you, unaware, unprotected, and with some kind of influence over the Jagan …”
Kurama trails off, but Yūsuke gets it.
Fuck.
She should have turned around and walked out of that park as soon as she’d seen that Hiei collapsed on the ground.
She never should have let Kuwabara get involved in this mess.
And she never should have indulged her own stupid ass impulses and dragged this clusterfuck to Keiko’s window.
Now all three of them are neck deep in a mess that Yūsuke has no idea how to handle beyond making sure she stays planted directly between Keiko and whatever might come.
Like always.
“And if he wakes up here?” Yūsuke asks. “In a room full of strangers?”
“I can keep Hiei well enough in hand,” Kurama attempts to reassure her. “Especially if the Jagan is … content from the start.”
Yūsuke darts a quick look to Kuwabara. He’s pale and his eyes are wide, but when he glances back at Yūsuke, his expression firms.
“I really really hate you,” Kuwabara mutters.
But then he gives her a shallow nod.
Yūsuke shifts just a bit to glance at Keiko over her shoulder.
Keiko’s face is flushed, her eyes are wide, but her face is set in that familiar stubborn expression.
The nod she gives Yūsuke is firm.
“Alright,” Yūsuke turns back to Kurama. “Guess we’re spending some quality time together then.”
At least, Yūsuke thinks as they settle down on their side of the room, Keiko still carefully tucked behind her and Kuwabara, the night can’t get much worse.
Which is, of course, the exact moment that Hiei groans and opens his eyes.
All three of them.